absolutely.

So the history of incarceration in America is interesting because before basically the Civil War, the places where we incarcerated people were mostly meant to handle the violent actions of white men.

Women and people of color were rarely incarcerated because punishment and detention was handled through the nuclear family.

It was your husband.

If you were unmarried, it was your father or your brothers.

If you were an enslaved black woman, it was the family that owned you.

And then with the Civil War, not only are enslaved women freed, but many, many, many white women move into the workforce, move into the kind of public lives that meant that they were now under the thumb of the state.

So how do you tease that apart? You know,

So w- tell, tell us a little bit about that statement.

Yeah.

You know, I think a lot about the difference between, um, what you might call vertical identities and horizontal identities.

Vertical identities are the ones that pass from parents to children.

You know, your national identity is often a vertical identity.

Your racial identity is often a vertical identity.

Religious identity.

You remind us that not everybody understood even those basic things and that, and, and you really did question your gender expression and gender identity and, uh, and that was part of what drove you through so much of what you did in the '90s and, and as you were growing up, um, while you were exploring what you, who you were tr- trying to be and who you wanted to be with.

friends and protest the Smithsonian.

When I had this realization where I was like, why am I going to protest the removal of one piece of like queer historical work in DC where I'm never going to see the show if it weren't for this when I can't see anything in New York uh this woman had put out a review of like the major museums in New York City in the previous decades and it's shown that like none of them basically had done shows on queer topics ever and I thought wait a second instead of spending all my energy protesting this which is important and good energy I love a protest What if I did something else and I created a museum to sort of ask the question, like, what would it even mean for a museum to exist that was by queer people, about queer people, for queer people, in queer spaces, in places where we couldn't get kicked out for using the wrong bathroom or being too sexual or offending straight people? And so I started the Pop-Up Museum of Queer History just as a sort of like provocation.

It was going to be a party that was also a museum.

And I didn't know how it was going to do.

I didn't know how people would respond.

But within weeks, I had people volunteering.

Buzz Slutsky, who's an artist and curator, volunteered.

Yeah.

And whenever I read, I think, well, which one is the lie and which one is the truth, right? And so I'm curious how you deal with evidence that might challenge the story you've been telling to yourself about yourself and how that kind of works itself out in the writing of a memoir.

So it's funny.

I actually did very little research for this book.

I did look at some photos.

I looked at some old documents.

But I really wanted to do something very different methodologically from what I was used to, because I was like, this will produce different results.

And I realized very early on exactly what you're saying.

And I'm curious about what resonates for them historically and what seems to activate or motivate them to come out of just passive watching.